The winner takes it all
In March 2007 I started to blog about the web and about digital startups. During these three years, it seems that the number of interesting new services has constantly become smaller, and that the attention that most new apps are getting from the early adopter crowd has decreased. I don't speak about those few "lucky" ones like Square, Foursquare, Gowalla or Plancast that literally transformed into stars on their first day of existence. I'm thinking about most other sites, sites that hardly anyone cares about.
Google, Facebook, Twitter and a few other services have not only grown into huge companies, but also gotten an increasing amount of coverage both among bloggers and mainstream press. Those companies have become superior in some way, drawing the best engineers/talents, the most venture capital (except Google) and the biggest press/user attention. Those companies with their vast manpower can develop a feature within some days that a tiny startup would need several month for. Or they can just acquire the independent apps they like (and their talent).
We are witnessing the maturity of what once was called Web 2.0, and we are seeing how the winners increasingly take it all (in their markets). It's not that smaller startups wouldn't have any good ideas. They do. But it's the big fishes that are driving innovation forward at a speed most other companies cannot compete with. More than often, what they come up with is more solid and simply better than what a young web startup has done.
The winner takes it all will be the motto of 2010. On the one hand it is sad to see how so many sites outside of the web major league are getting nothing but ignorance. On the other hand, they don't deserve anything else if they aren't able to be better.
The winner takes it all usually leads to a less competitive market. Some people might even see indications for monopolies. I'm not that concerned. At some point huge corporations get lazy, lose their flexibility and miss new opportunities and trends. We are not there yet, but one day we will be. That day, we could see something of a new bubble, like we had some years ago. Hundreds of venture backed startups fighting for their piece of the still uneaten cake. That time had its charm, too.
